Category Archives: Vintage Computing

While searching for some Kawai K1 soundfonts (since I no longer own my K1) I stumbled across this super-cool album on Archive.org of spacey synth jams made entirely with K1 sounds. I still haven’t located a free K1 soundfont, but this album gives me something fun to listen to in the meantime.

Anthill Recordings has released 豪華漆 418, by deluxepaint 418, a vaporwave LP made entirely with Amiga Protracker. The classic 4 channel horizontal scrolling music tracker was one of the first of it’s kind, and can still be found online to run on Amiga emulators, or in MorphOS.

Samples played through the 8 bit, 32,000 hz Amiga give it an instant grittiness, which is one of the the things that makes 豪華漆 418 such an interesting sounding recording. It’s only $3 to download it in flac, mp3, or aac! So it’s totally worth the money!

Vaporwave Fashion

Vaporwave is difficult to describe in full: it is both an aesthetic and a cultural movement that is having a major moment in fashion. Closely related to seapunk, this aesthetic takes cues from cyberpunk and dystopian capitalism and often features Japanese writing, grid motifs, classical sculptures, and 80s and 90s technology. Recently, certain brands have come to understand its popularity amongst young Internet users and have started to manufacture clothes and bags that emulate the Vaporwave style.

Digging this Vaporwave style? Here is a curated list of some of the best translations of Vaporwave from the Internet to clothing.

This video was thought lost until last week when the Bell Labs engineer and inventor Hal Alles uploaded the clip to YouTube. The Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer, also known as Alice, is considered the worlds first true digital additive synthesizer.

This video was made as an backup accompaniment to a live demo done on the stage at the Palladium in Hollywood in 1977.

Built in the 1970s Alice used 72 computer controlled oscillators to instantly create the different timbres and sounds. This synth gave the user the opportunity to store banks of preset patches and autonomous accompaniment, which at the time was unheard of.

The demise of Alice is quite a sad story, after only four years the the synthesizer was dismantled as it was far too expensive too be commercially viable. In it’s short life it only had one full composition written on it…

Considered the first electrical speech synthesizer, VODER (Voice Operation DEmonstratoR) was developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs and demonstrated at both the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Difficult to use and difficult to operate, VODER nonetheless paved the way for future machine-generated speech.

A friend of mine showed me this video on youtube and I had no idea speech synthesis was this old! Too cool not to share with my readers!